OYAToMLG talking about gabby PR seeking agents and beautiful loft off Prince & Broadway

figuring why this thing finally sold ain‘t easy

Another pure (actual day) One Year Ago on Manhattan Loft Guy post from N’Awlins…. A year ago today I was snarking about the Public Relations efforts of Some Real Estate Agents who are very good at PR and were successful at selling a lovely classic loft in prime Soho, but who deserve to be nipped for telling a strange story to try to explain why 3 teams of earlier agents had been unsuccessful in selling the loft. If this sounds like a bit too much inside baseball among Manhattan real estate agents, but you can be confident that I walked through the marketing campaigns of 2009, of 2010, and of 2011 into 2012, so there is some substance to the post.
 

The post is my March 21, 2012, real estate sales made easy: 88 Prince Street loft sells because (some say) it is correctly located, of course. I confess to having enjoyed The Real Deal article as a kind of guilty pleasure; yes, it got me so irritated because TRD gave voice to a ridiculous bit of agent-bashing, but the anecdotes and editorial choices in the article were just so weird (an ancient Fugees name check, Usher didn’t rent it but he really liked it??). I can’t say I understand the motivation of the agents or TRD, but there must be some serious back-scratching going on there to merit that kind of silly story-telling, and it is fascinating to see a ‘professional’ PR apparatus at work.
 

On the substance, the short story is that the “3,000 sq ft” Manhattan loft #7C at 88 Prince Street was offered at $3.8mm in early 2009, and at higher prices in each year thereafter, before (finally!) selling at $3.5mm 13 months ago. I described the building (the Little Singer Building) as “one of the most beautiful loft buildings in Manhattan, not just in Soho.”
 

It is, of course, hard to say why this loft did not sell earlier, in part because an outsider never knows if the seller was as willing to negotiate at the beginning as at the end. You’d think the thing was in range of a reasonable offer throughout much of the listing period. One thing I am highly confident about: a sale was not prevented because listing agents failed to let potential buyers know where this building is.
 

© Sandy Mattingly 2013